Good morning, it’s Monday. Somewhere out there, a color exists that almost no one has seen—we’ll explain.
Plus: AlexNet’s legendary code just dropped — 13 years after it sparked the AI revolution. OpenAI is shopping for coding tools like it’s on a deadline. And Bill Gates predicts an AI-powered early retirement plan for humanity.
Read on!
🗞️ ICYMI RECAP
Top Stories You Might Have Missed
🔍 ChatGPT Now Personalizes Web Searches: OpenAI’s new “Memory with Search” feature lets ChatGPT tailor online queries using details from past chats—like your diet or location. It rewrites prompts to be more relevant, but users can disable it in settings if desired.
🛒 OpenAI Courted Cursor First: OpenAI twice approached Anysphere, maker of the popular AI coding tool Cursor, before shifting to $3B talks with Windsurf. Despite Cursor’s stronger revenue, the deal fell through—highlighting OpenAI’s urgency to secure a foothold in code generation.
🌱 DeepMind Says AI Needs Its Own Life: Google’s DeepMind says current AI hits a ceiling due to static training data—its new “streams” model pushes agents to learn from long-term real-world experience, not just prompts. The goal? Smarter, self-evolving AI beyond human limits.
⚠️ AI Support Bot Invents Policy: Cursor’s AI agent “Sam” falsely told users they needed separate subscriptions per device, sparking backlash and cancellations—highlighting the growing risk of unlabeled AI in frontline support roles without proper oversight or clear human disclosure.
🦾 Bill Gates Says AI Will End Labor Shortages: Gates says AI will fill global gaps in healthcare and education, automate blue-collar jobs, and eventually let people retire earlier or work less—prompting a rethink of how we spend our time in a post-work world.
🔲 UAE Eyes U.S. AI Chips After $1.4T Pledge: G42 CEO says the UAE is making “tangible progress” toward securing advanced semiconductors from the U.S., following a massive $1.4 trillion commitment to deepen strategic ties and boost AI development.
💸 VC’s AI Paradox Means More Efficiency Yet Bigger Checks: Despite AI’s promise to cut startup costs, early-stage funding rounds are ballooning—fueled by hype, fund dynamics, and the race to dominate “winner-take-all” markets. Efficiency, it seems, is making spending go up.
👔 Intel CEO Reshapes Team, Names AI Chief: New CEO Lip-Bu Tan flattens Intel’s org chart, promoting Sachin Katti to lead AI strategy and tech—aiming to cut red tape, speed decisions, and revive innovation as the company battles NVIDIA in the AI chip race.
🛠️ Uber CEO Says AI Skills Will Be Essential Within a Year: Dara Khosrowshahi says too few Uber employees know how to use AI and calls training an “absolute necessity”—echoing a growing trend among tech leaders making AI proficiency a baseline job expectation.
📰 AI Wrote an Italian Newspaper for a Month: Il Foglio handed its newsroom to an AI, publishing 22 chatbot-penned articles—and found it fast, witty, and flawed. Editor Claudio Cerasa says AI won’t replace reporters, but sharpen their role: the future belongs to journalists.
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—Matt and the Team
📂 OPEN SOURCE
AlexNet’s Source Code Goes Public, Illuminating the Roots of Deep Learning
The Recap: The original source code for AlexNet, the landmark 2012 neural network that catalyzed the deep learning era, has been open-sourced via GitHub. The release, coordinated by the Computer History Museum and Google, offers rare insight into the codebase that helped define modern AI. Written by Alex Krizhevsky under the mentorship of Geoffrey Hinton and Ilya Sutskever, AlexNet paved the way for today's generative AI tools, including ChatGPT.
Highlights:
AlexNet’s source code, originally authored in 2012 by University of Toronto graduate student Alex Krizhevsky, is now publicly available on GitHub.
The release was made possible through a five-year negotiation involving the Computer History Museum, Krizhevsky, Geoffrey Hinton, and Google’s legal team.
AlexNet demonstrated that deep neural networks, trained on large datasets using GPUs, could outperform humans in image classification tasks.
The model was enabled by the convergence of three key advances: the ImageNet dataset, GPU computing (via NVIDIA CUDA), and backpropagation algorithms.
Its success triggered rapid development in neural networks, leading to breakthroughs in image recognition, game playing (e.g., AlphaGo), and generative AI.
AlexNet is now seen as the foundation for the deep learning paradigm, directly influencing models like ChatGPT, released a decade later in 2022.
Forward Future Takeaways:
Releasing the AlexNet code isn't just a nod to history—it’s a critical moment of transparency for AI's foundational tech. For researchers, students, and historians alike, access to the original codebase demystifies one of the most influential architectures in modern computing. → Read the full article here.
🎨 ART
AI and Art History Unite to Unravel the Secrets of Delacroix’s Murals
The Recap: A new initiative called Digital Delacroix, backed by Schmidt Sciences and Sorbonne University, is using artificial intelligence to digitize and analyze the work of Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix. Led by French art historian Barthélémy Jobert, the project aims to resolve questions of authorship in Delacroix’s large-scale murals and reconstruct lost artworks. The effort is part of a broader $10 million humanities-AI fund from Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s philanthropic organization.
Highlights:
The Schmidt Sciences grant, estimated in the high six figures, will support computing resources and dual-trained researchers in AI and art history — a rare combination.
Digital Delacroix will digitize Delacroix’s letters, journals, contemporary accounts, and murals, making them accessible online for scholarly and public use.
The project focuses on Delacroix’s rarely seen murals in the French Parliament, especially in the Palais Bourbon’s library, where attribution between master and assistants remains unclear.
AI will be trained on high-resolution images and photogrammetric 3D scans to distinguish individual brushstrokes and styles using computer vision.
Brent Seales, who leads humanities-AI at Schmidt Sciences, likened the attribution challenge to his previous work decoding carbonized papyri from Pompeii.
The project plans a virtual recreation of destroyed murals from Paris’s Hôtel de Ville, including “Peace Descends to Earth,” lost during the 1871 Paris Commune fires.
Forward Future Takeaways:
This project reflects a growing convergence between artificial intelligence and the humanities, showing how machine learning can illuminate historical mysteries once thought unsolvable. By applying computer vision to questions of authorship and loss, Digital Delacroix not only expands art historical understanding but also tests the limits of analytical AI in cultural preservation. How might similar methods reshape attribution in other fields — from literature to music to architecture? → Read the full article here.
🔬 RESEARCH
Scientists Engineer Human Vision to Perceive a New Color: ‘Olo’
Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a technique called “Oz” that enables the human eye to perceive a previously unseen color, named “olo.” By precisely stimulating medium-wavelength (M) cones in the retina using targeted laser pulses, they isolated these photoreceptors without activating the long (L) and short (S) cones. This selective stimulation resulted in the perception of a highly saturated blue-green hue, described by participants as unlike any naturally occurring color.
The method required detailed mapping of each participant’s unique cone layout using advanced imaging techniques such as adaptive optics optical coherence tomography (AO-OCT). While the discovery primarily advances the understanding of human vision, it also holds potential for studying visual disorders and exploring treatments for color blindness. → Read the full paper here.
📽️ VIDEO
AI News: Gemini 2.5 Flash, o3 and o4, Claude Research, Kling 2.0, and More!
Matt unpacks the week in AI: Gemini 2.5 Flash drops as a budget hybrid, OpenAI nails photo geolocation, Replit levels up agents, and Microsoft rewires RPA. Plus: model wars and social app buzz. Get the full scoop! 👇
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